FIRE Calculator
Find your Financial Independence, Retire Early number — and see when you'll actually reach it. Every figure is shown in today's purchasing power, so you're comparing real dollars, not inflated ones.
Your numbers
All amounts are today's dollars — the calculator handles inflation internally.
Not sure? Build it up from weekly/monthly costs
Most people know their spending in pieces — rent, groceries, petrol — better than they know their annual total. Fill in whichever rows apply, at whatever frequency is easiest, and this adds them up for you.
Total, annualized: $0
Before inflation. 7% is a common long-run stock-market assumption.
Real return (after inflation)
4% is the traditional “4% rule.” Lower = more conservative. Edit either field — they're linked: the dollar amount is the portfolio size that rate implies for your annual expenses (your Traditional FIRE number). Type a target dollar amount instead, and the rate updates to match.
Traditional FIRE vs. Coast FIRE vs. Barista FIRE: what's the difference?
Traditional FIRE, Coast FIRE, and Barista FIRE are the three main paths to Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) — they all describe when and how you can rely on your investments instead of a full-time paycheck. The difference is how much of your expenses your portfolio needs to cover, and how soon you can get there.
Read the full breakdown of all three
What is Traditional FIRE?
Traditional FIRE is the original FIRE strategy: save and invest until your portfolio alone can cover 100% of your living expenses, forever — usually measured with a safe withdrawal rate like the 4% rule — then stop working completely. Because nothing else is contributing to your living costs once you retire, your Traditional FIRE number is the biggest of the three.
What is Coast FIRE?
Coast FIRE answers a different question: can you stop saving without stopping working? Once you've invested enough that compound growth alone — with zero further contributions — will reach your full FIRE number by your target retirement age, you've hit your Coast FIRE number. You keep working and covering today's bills with your income, but investing becomes optional. Because it only asks “can I stop contributing,” Coast FIRE is usually the soonest of the three milestones to reach.
What is Barista FIRE?
Barista FIRE is a partial-retirement strategy: leave full-time work earlier and cover part of your expenses with part-time or side income (the name comes from taking a job like Starbucks partly for the benefits), drawing the rest from a smaller investment portfolio. Because that income covers part of the gap, your Barista FIRE number is smaller than Traditional FIRE — just enough to fund the difference.
The age you actually want to stop working entirely.
Annual, today's dollars — covers part of your expenses indefinitely.
Growth projection
Your FIRE number at different withdrawal rates
A lower withdrawal rate is more conservative (needs a bigger portfolio) but has a higher chance of lasting a very long retirement.
What this tool does and doesn't do: this is a deterministic, constant-return projection in today's dollars — it does not run historical market-cycle backtesting or Monte Carlo simulation (real market returns vary year to year, and a plan that works at a steady 7% can still fail against a bad sequence of early-retirement returns). It also doesn't model taxes, Social Security, pensions, healthcare-cost changes, or account-type (401k/IRA/taxable) withdrawal ordering. Treat the numbers here as a directional planning estimate, not a guarantee — and this isn't financial advice. All calculations run in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere or stored.